Well, this is very interesting to see. I’m just starting the learning curve of this federated networking stuff, but seeing all these comments helps a lot. Coming from Reddit, I think I can get used to it pretty quickly.

this is a great PSA! and yes, lemmy does not auto subscribe you to new communities that are created.

Great catch there, and worth mentioning!

At the moment of typing, the https://lemmy.whynotdrs.org/ instance has 171 users. These are people who have opened their account on this instance and log in through this instance when participating.

Meanwhile, the largest community on this instance (DRSyourGME) has 109 subscribers right now. I believe this would also include people whose accounts are from other instances, but who subscribed to this instance. Thanks to the Federated nature of Lemmy, people can do that!

That means it’s likely close to just half of the people who use this instance that are actively subscribed to DRSyourGME. Right now, there’s not too much difference in browsing - there are few other communities and none near as large - but eventually there will be a clear difference in how the feed is presented.

Love this discussion, love learning about the platform.

In your profile settings, there is a setting for whether you want your default feed to be “subscribed” or “local”. I do think subscribed makes more sense logically, but local is also there if what you prefer is just to see everything in the instance by default (until it gets noisy enough that you prefer to filter some communities out)